From Tableaux to Automata for Description Logics

Franz Baader, Jan Hladik, Carsten Lutz, Frank Wolter

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between automata-and tableau-based inference procedures for description logics. To be more precise, we develop an abstract notion of what a tableau-based algorithm is, and then show, on this abstract level, how tableau-based algorithms can be converted into automata-based algorithms. In particular, this allows us to characterize a large class of tableau-based algorithms that imply an ExpTime upper-bound for reasoning in the description logics for which such an algorithm exists.